
British colonial officials may have thought they’d fallen down the rabbit hole when they stumbled across rows of humans heads mounted on stakes along the southern border of Yunnan Province in the early 1900s. But this wasn’t the work of Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts, just the results of a Wazu (佤族) tribe ritual that put captured enemy troops to use as sacrifices to nature deities. Even up until the 1950s, it wasn’t uncommon to see human heads among corpses of cattle, chickens, pig and oxen on the edges of the Wa’s grain fields. Nowadays, the tribe adopts a friendlier approach to outsiders, greeting them with a frenzied dancing display. It’s probably just a coincidence that their signature move is reminiscent of headbanging—the women sing and show off their locks by whipping them back and forth to signal their maturity to the rest of the clan. - jeSSIca rapp (阮潔茜)